Read e-book online Ahead of the Curve: David Baltimore's Life in Science PDF

Read e-book online Ahead of the Curve: David Baltimore's Life in Science PDF

By Shane Crotty

ISBN-10: 0520225570

ISBN-13: 9780520225572

In Fifties, Watson and Crick verified a so-called "central dogma" in molecular biology: DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes proteins. besides the fact that, round 1970, teams in US stumbled on the 1st exception of this rule. David Baltimore's and Howard Temin's groups stumbled on that RNA makes DNA! This unforeseen discovering of theirs in cancer-causing RNA viruses not just made this box up-side down, but additionally opened a brand new street referred to as "recombinant know-how" a decade later, for cloning genes and transfering any gene from one species to a different nearly at will. as a result, Baltimore and Temin shared a Nobel prize in 1975. Baltimore's greatness prolonged past the technology. He seen this global in an "unconventional" demeanour. He married a highly-talented chinese language biologist, and protested opposed to the hugely debatable US wars in Vietnam and Iraq. He has a superb knowledge which lets study from this well-written biography.

Here's a vigorous heritage of contemporary physics, as visible throughout the lives of thirty women and men from the pantheon of physics. William H. Cropper vividly portrays the lifestyles and accomplishments of such giants as Galileo and Isaac Newton, Marie Curie and Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, correct as much as modern figures reminiscent of Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, and Stephen Hawking.

Ludwig Boltzmann arguably performed the major position in developing that submicroscopic buildings underlie the normal global. He had an enormous impression on past due 19th-century and early 20th-century physics, and he expected many modern rules, together with Kuhn's thought of clinical revolutions and up to date theories of information in response to Darwinian rules.

At a time whilst the new york venture used to be synonymous with large-scale technological know-how, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67) represented the hot sociocultural strength of the yank highbrow. Catapulted to repute as director of the Los Alamos atomic guns laboratory, Oppenheimer occupied a key place within the compact among technological know-how and the country that built out of worldwide struggle II.

Einstein In His personal phrases collects knowledge and perception instantly from the brain of the main well-known genius of the 20 th century. learn Einstein's ideas and writings on a number of topics, together with relativity, black holes, atomic power, time shuttle, and extra. Insightful costs include:It is often pleasant while a good and gorgeous inspiration proves to be consonant with truth.

Extra info for Ahead of the Curve: David Baltimore's Life in Science

Sample text

A coat-and-tie a¤air, dinner always pleased. A group of students known as “the last of the big spenders” ate steak every night for an extra dollar. Lunches were even better, held in a huge, austere dining hall whose floor was lined with rows of long wooden tables in the English college tradition. Only graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and professors were admitted, and dress was formal. They sat anywhere, without regard to seniority. Baltimore routinely sat next to Peyton Rous, winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for his work on cancer, or Fritz Lipmann, winner of the 1953 Nobel Prize for his biochemical elucidation of basic metabolism.

Thomas Hunt Morgan, probably the greatest geneticist of the early twentieth century, built on Mendel’s ideas by using fruit flies (Drosophila) to study hereditary traits. Fruit flies gave quick results because of their short lifespan and rapid breeding: thus genetic experiments could be completed in two weeks instead of the months it took using Mendel’s pea plants, or the years it took with Jackson Lab’s mice. Huge numbers of flies could be stored in mason jars, and Drosophila had plenty of observable genetic traits to be explored, such as eye color, wing shape, and hair length.

Streisinger showed Baltimore how to grow bacterial colonies on a petri dish filled with agar, a gelatinous substance. First the bacteria must be diluted. If bacteria from a flask teeming with growth are poured onto an agar dish, the plate becomes a bacterial lawn, covered with growth. But for bacterial genetics experiments, individual bacterial clones are needed. So the bacterial culture is first diluted one million–fold, and then a small volume of culture, containing between ten and one hundred bacteria, is poured onto an agar dish.